


days of silence, grow strong

by multicorn



Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 14:20:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/812540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/multicorn/pseuds/multicorn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt and Blaine were talking on the phone, and now they’re not.  Bits of canon fill-in from “I Do” to “Wonder-ful.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	days of silence, grow strong

When Kurt gets back from the wedding-that-wasn’t, he calls Blaine almost every day.  Sometimes more than once.  And Blaine calls him too.  It’s fun, and comfortable, to share little anecdotes or complain about classes and work, and sometimes to stay on the phone together for a whole movie or more.  Kurt just loves being friends with him - he’d really missed not talking to his best friend for a while, and this is so much better, it makes his whole day brighter even to spend five minutes on the phone with Blaine, and Blaine says that he feels the same way.

This goes on for about ten days, and then he gets snowed into the apartment with Rachel and Adam and Santana, and he makes the - in hindsight - incredibly _stupid_  decision to watch  _Moulin Rouge_ , because he’d thought he could handle it for some reason, he’d thought he was happy with Blaine-his-best-friend now, and that Blaine-his-boyfriend was a distant memory and better off that way…

And so he ends up feeling displaced and disoriented, crying on the couch.  Because it’s not a snowy rooftop and Blaine’s not  _there_ , but for just a few minutes he was again, and.  He can’t deal with talking to Blaine or texting with Blaine or even  _thinking_ about Blaine, really, because the Blaine that he talks to isn’t the boy from his dreams, but he’s too close, and the re-opened wound hurts almost as badly as if he’d never gone through those slow months of mourning and healing and rebuilding at all.

~*~

Over at McKinley, Blaine’s walking around for the week-or-so past the wedding with a ridiculous smile on his face, besotted and acting like everything’s all right in the world, even when he has to make up a weekly assignment to keep Finn and Mr. Schue from gnawing at each other’s throats until the Glee club has nothing whatsoever resembling a faculty leader.  But then he starts getting edgy, and Sam doesn’t know why.

“Kurt’s ignoring my calls again,” says Blaine, frustrated, and holds out his phone to Sam as if to demonstrate.  “He didn’t call me the day before yesterday, he hasn’t answered my calls yesterday  _or_  this morning, he hasn’t even sent me a text!  We’ve been talking a lot since the wedding, you know, and now, poof, silence!  I don’t even have a  _clue_  what I’ve done!”

“That sucks,” says Sam, and closes his locker before hitching his backpack onto his shoulder.  “Maybe it’s the wedding?”

“How does that even make sense?  We had fun there!  And, you know,” he lowers his voice, conspiratorially, “we hooked up, like, a lot that weekend.”

“Exactly!” Sam says, because sometimes things that should be obvious to Blaine just aren’t.  “You weren’t dating, but you still had sex, and you know sometimes guys don’t like girls that hook up too easily.  And before you tell me off, I  _know_ you’re not a girl.  And I didn’t think he was that kind of guy, but,” and Sam spreads his arms wide as if to say, it seems like the facts say otherwise.

“What the fuck,” says Blaine, as he follows Sam into Glee club, and he’s getting kind of pissed.

~*~

“I’ve thought about what you said,” Blaine says, on the phone with Sam later that night, “but it doesn’t make sense.  I don’t think the problem can be anything we did at the wedding, because he kept talking to me for a  _while_  after that.  Like, way over a week.  It has to be something else.”

“So think!” Sam says.  “What were you talking about before you stopped talking?  Did you say anything unusual to him?  Do you know what he was doing?  Come on, this is basic spy stuff, you shouldn’t need me to spell it out for you.”

“I don’t remember!” Blaine says, “It’s not like I was trying to keep track!  He was complaining about how Santana was going through all of his and Rachel’s things, and Rachel was extra mopey for no reason that he could tell, and he was tempted to just throw Santana out for invasion of both of their privacy but it was snowing, and… oh shit.”

“What is it?” Sam asks, excited though the staticy speaker.  “What did you remember!?”

“And he said it was a good thing that Adam was coming over to distract him.”

“Who’s Adam?”

“The guy he’s been sort-of dating,” Blaine says.  He doesn’t want to say anything more, it’s not relevant - and he doesn’t actually know anything more to say anyway, which kind of stings, because he hadn’t realized he’d been kept that out of the loop.

“Oh.”  And Sam sounds like he gets it now, the gravity of the situation, but fuck that’s not good.  Blaine doesn’t want there to be a situation at all.

~*~

Sam doesn’t, actually, have any suggestions to help (any  _usable_ suggestions,  since the Blond Chamelon can’t do impersonations well enough to trick anyone), but he’s inadvertently providing a really good distraction.  Blaine can’t bear mooning over Kurt right now; not when it seems that Kurt’s chosen this other guy over him, without even a word.  They were supposed to still be friends, and Kurt had told him they were!  But a silence like this isn’t what you would do to your best friend…

Nursing a hopeless unrequited crush, on the other hand, is apparently exactly what you do to your friend.  Blaine wasn’t planning on it, really, but it’s what he did with Kurt (and that did work out amazingly, for a while), and it seems to be what he’s doing again.  Because Sam is so cute, and so funny, and he’s been here for Blaine through a lot of stuff when Kurt really, really hasn’t ( _including stuff that Kurt’s put me through_ , he wants to say, viciously, but that’s probably not fair.  Probably).  And, most importantly, he’s here now.  So it’s so easy for Blaine to just imagine that one day he’ll lower his voice when they’re talking about other things, and say  _I have a secret to tell you…_

Blaine feels guilty for spending so much time thinking about him, especially when it comes to the alone-in-bed-at-night kind of thinking, but he feels even worse when he thinks about Kurt, because maybe they’re mostly okay like they were and maybe they’re not and he doesn’t even know, it’s exhausting is what it is, and the more days go on without any of his calls or texts being answered, the worse it gets.

He feels like he’s drifting, and he doesn’t even know which way is up or down, and the worst part isn’t even the abandonment but the hopelessness of the confusion.  He throws himself into Glee club stuff, and it’s fine, for the most part -  _he’s_  fine, not like the fall - but he would just really like to have a clue what’s going on.

~*~

Back in New York, Kurt doesn’t really see Adam again after that week.  That is - technically he does; they still go to the same school, and he’s not going to quit the Apples because he really does love having a group to sing with that’s just for fun, almost like New Directions back in the very old days when they hadn’t bonded yet in anything besides song.  But they don’t talk, the two of them, not after the sad fizzle of a date that was their trip to see  _Silver Linings Playbook_ , not after Kurt couldn’t find it in his heart to say anything romantic about ‘them,’ and Adam said  _goodbye_  so, so quietly when they parted that evening without a kiss goodnight.

They don’t break up for a while.  Adam doesn’t call again, or ask him out, and Kurt doesn’t call Adam, because really what is there to say.  So it’s unclear in his mind.  But that’s not the most important thing, because he’s so stuck again on Blaine, just on  _missing_ him, the one he used to love, and he’s lonely and he would like things to stop hurting, and he even buys a pillow to cuddle with but it doesn’t help.  Life goes on; Santana and Rachel are there, and having friends who are around, who he can sing and dance with, whom he’s never created a thousand plans with to come back and choke him now, well, it helps more than a pillow, at least.  Mostly he watches a lot of TV, and under the combined weight of Jessica Fletcher and the Golden Girls, Christian and Satine fade away.

After a couple of weeks - three?  Or is it closer to four? he goes right up to Adam after rehearsal, and says, “just to be clear, you know that we’re not dating or anything, right?”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that out,” Adam says, and he doesn’t look  _too_  unhappy.  “Are you quitting the group?”

“No, no!” Kurt says.

“Okay, then,” and Adam shrugs, and turns away, and well, that was always meant to be simple, so it’s a good thing it was.

~*~

Blaine’s eating lunch with Tina, and commiserating with her, because Sam’s symapthetic but he’s tired of hearing about it by now.  Tina, though - Tina completely understands how much all of this sucks.  Because seriously, when people stop calling you just like that, that is  _so_  not cool.  Mike didn’t call her either after he broke up with her and they’d been together for ages, and he was her best friend too, her only close friend, really, and he didn’t even call her  _when_ he broke up with her, he did it over text.

“I’m so sorry, Tina,” he says, and he’s not going to bash Mike because Mike is his  _friend_ , but still, “that is a really shitty move.  Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”

“I didn’t want people to know I was blown off so easily,” she says, and stabs messily at her tater tots.  The spork smushes them, and she drops it with a sigh.  “Anway.  You shouldn’t let Kurt treat you like that either, Blaine, you deserve better than that.  You know what?  It’s been so long that if he calls you right now, you just shouldn’t answer.”  She nods decisively.

“You’re probably right,” Blaine says, and then his phone rings.  It’s “Blackbird,” and it’s Kurt, of course.  “I’ll be back,” he tells Tina, and he picks it up.  “Kurt?”

He gets up to go outside, where he can have a real conversation, and Tina raises her eyebrows at him so hard but he really doesn’t care right now.  Kurt’s on the other end of the line.

~*~

“Blaine?”  Kurt’s voice is tremulous, nervous-sounding, and Blaine has no idea why, but he’s so relieved just to hear it anyway.

“Yeah.  What is it?”  Because it must be  _something_ , he hasn’t heard from Kurt in way too long…

“I just missed you.”

“Oh.”  And Blaine’s glad that Kurt’s not calling because of anything bad, but he’s angry too.  Why  _now?_   “So why didn’t you call before?”

Kurt sighs.  “I just couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t - ” Kurt stops, and Blaine waits.  “I was watching a movie, and it made me sad because of you.  I’m sorry.  Is this still okay?”

“It’s always okay,” says Blane honestly, with a restlessly angry shrug that Kurt can’t see.  “I still want to talk to you.  But could you not just randomly stop calling me again in the future?  I thought we were at least friends.”

“I hope we still are,” says Kurt.

“We are,” says Blaine, and blows out his breath, tries to let it go for now.

“So,” asks Kurt, brightly, “what have you been up to for the last few weeks?”

And Blaine tells him proudly about the assignments he’s made up, the mash-up to make Finn and Mr. Schue stop feuding, and the guilty pleasures week - not about the thing with Sam, of course, but Wham! and Copacabana and the Spice Girls and Bobby Brown.  “And we finished the week with Mamma Mia,” he concludes.

“That’s crazy!” Kurt says.  “We did Mamma Mia too!”

“You mean, you sang it?”

“Not just sang, we did this little dance in the apartment, and Santana had hula hoops lying around for some reason, and it was so crazy, it really felt like New Directions at their best.  And so even after everything that’s happened, you know, I still wished you were there.”

You can’t hug a phone, and that’s frustrating sometimes, but Blaine feels his smile crack again like it did on Thanksgiving.  “I wish so too.”

~*~

After that, they talk some again, but it’s a little more stilted compared to that glorious week-and-a-half after the wedding, and mostly text exchanges, like it was in the winter before Christmas.  Blaine can’t help be frustrated.  He doesn’t want to give up on Kurt, but two steps forward, one step back, it hurts so much, and he’s doubting again whether they’ll really get anywhere at all.  He still doesn’t know why the step back, Kurt won’t explain any more than he did, but he can’t actually give up on Kurt either it seems, not when talking to him is precious and hilarious and still makes him feel more understood and cared for and happy than anyone else in his life.

~*~

Kurt doesn’t mention anyone he might be seeing in New York, doesn’t say anything about it, but maybe he wouldn’t, and eventually Blaine just has to ask.  “Are you seeing anyone now?”

“No,” Kurt laughs, “I haven’t been for maybe, a month now?  I don’t know.  Things didn’t really work out between Adam and I, and I’m just… taking a break from it right now.  Not feeling it, I guess.  I’m so busy here - did I tell you?  Isabelle asked me to help her with the New York City Ballet Spring Gala!”

“That’s great?” Blaine guesses.

“It really is,” Kurt says, “it’s the event of the season, you have no idea, can I tell you?”

“Of course,” Blaine says, and he listens to Kurt all caught up in the city again, but it doesn’t hurt so much this time.  Kurt will listen to him, when he talks, he thinks; Kurt comments with enthusiasm on everything the Glee club does.  He’s not really sharing anything more personal right now, but then again, all the most important personal things that Blaine has to say right now are about Kurt.

~*~

He’s relieved that Kurt’s not dating anyone else anymore, at least, even if he’s not going to be dating him - right now, maybe later, maybe soon - so he tells Sam as soon as he can, almost bouncing on his feet.

“Of course,” says Sam, “you’re, like, everything,” and he waves his hand vaguely up and down in the direction of Blaine’s body.  “Why would he choose anyone else?”

“Um, you thought he did earlier?” Blaine reminds him.

Sam shrugs.  “So I was wrong.  It wouldn’t have made sense though, I mean, I don’t even like dudes, but I’m sure if I did I’d be into you.”

“Um, thanks?”  Blaine’s a little uncomfortable with that comment, honestly, but he wonders if Sam’s doing it on purpose.  Testing the waters of friendship, or something.  It’s a nice thought.

~*~

And then Kurt’s preparing to come back to Ohio.

Blaine’s so excited to see him again, on the other end of the phone line, but he doesn’t say much.  Kurt’s worried, and he’s not coming back for Blaine.

“Carole’s picking me up from the airport,” he says, “and I don’t want to see anyone else till I come to McKinley, okay, so please don’t try anything.”

“Okay,” says Blaine, and he doesn’t try to argue, because it doesn’t make sense but Kurt sounds so stressed out now, and he doesn’t need arguments on top of it all.  “I wish I could help.”

“You have been,” Kurt says.  “Just by keeping an eye on him, you’ve helped so much.  I’m sorry I didn’t thank your for your weekly updates for while, by the way, but you should know that I did appreciate them, even when I wasn’t responding.”

“Thanks for telling me,” says Blaine, “you’re welcome.”  And oh, if only there was some way he could send calm through a telephone line.

“Well, i have to go now,” says Kurt, awkwardly, “I’ll see you in a couple days, okay?”

“Okay.”

And he can feel it in his bones, his limbs, he’s trying to hold it in because there’s too much to do but he’s starving for it, just to see Kurt with his own two eyes, soon again, to maybe hold his hand.


End file.
